I have remarked several times over the past few weeks about the need for community during the transition.  It will be disastrous for universities and colleges as educational communities to go back in a way that includes only certain people.  If international students, students living with elderly relatives, students with compromised immune systems or students with disabilities are either not invited back at the same time as everyone else, or are only offered a continuation of remote classes while others come back face-to-face, the re-open will be a farce.  Quite apart from the fact that a two-tier system like that is actually more time consuming to deliver, it sends a terrible message about who is and is not considered part of the community (if you want to see a particularly ugly example of this, take a look at how Purdue university has said it will handle the fall re-entry) – and that will have real repercussions for years to come.

(Caveat: institutions might be able to make a distinction between graduate and undergraduate students.  If all undergraduates are off campus, it should be possible to hold small graduate classes in larger rooms designed for undergraduates.  I think that would be OK, as long as measures were taken to ensure all graduate students could come back safely.)

I think on the whole that Canadian universities have been thinking in these terms when developing plans for the fall.  This is why we are seeing (behind the scenes of course, no one is saying anything openly yet) that the plans being constructed assume that the entire fall term is going to be online, precisely because there is no easy way to pivot back to face-to-face midway through a term without excluding people.  For the sake of campus community, we’re probably online all term.

(Quick update: the Digital Resources Consortium I proposed back here and here is now off the ground with a little bit of philanthropic support, and with the estimable David Graham, former Provost at both Concordia and Ottawa, leading the effort.  Shoot me a line at ausher@higheredstrategy.com if you want to join or learn more)

So, simple right?  Everything is online until January? 

Well maybe not.  Because there is another type of community we need to think about too.

Take an extreme example like, I don’t know – Nunavut Arctic College.  No international student to speak of.  Students nearly all live within ready transport distance of one of the campuses.  No infections in the territory.  No reason really to not be teaching in person, right?  Now, start thinking of example which deviate from this a little bit.  University College of the North in Manitoba, maybe.  Or Moncton’s satellite campuses in Edmundston or Shippagan.  Low/no local cases, a student body which is local – why delay face-to-face? 

You see where I am going, right?  Places like McGill or Centennial College, where less than half the student body comes from within driving distance of the school and where we are likely still going to have cases of community transmission of COVID into the fall (though hopefully at much lower levels than now), the ability to pivot online mid-term is virtually zero. 

But what about cases where there is zero community transmission, a whole lot of local kids AND a whole lot of international students.  Say, UPEI.  There might be almost no barrier whatsoever to local kids coming back, but for the “community” reasons outlined above, the school may be reluctant to open its doors without allowing international students to come back.  But think about the argument from the local community, the one whose tax dollars built the university: why should their kids have to wait to get back to face-to-face just because international students can’t make it back. Whose university is this anyway?

That’s a community argument too, and one that in many ways is no less valid than the appeal to the internal campus community.  And there are a whole lot of institutions which are going to be in enough of a grey zone (i.e. somewhere between McGill and Nunavut Arctic College) that there will be real questions about how to evaluate these competing claims of community.  Balancing those two sets of community imperatives is one of those fiendishly difficult jobs that university and college presidents are going to have to make over the next few weeks.  I don’t envy them.

Brief note: I am taking next week off.  On my regular schedule I should have taken a break last week, but too much was going on so I postponed but now I am properly burnt-out and need to take my week.  Will see you back here Monday May 18^th for a last 4-5 week sprint to the finish. if I am not back on that date, check your spam filters (which is where these emails often go after a week on hiatus).